Second chapter as promised(even though we are still one power stone short)
...
And so they knelt.
Well, most of them, did at least.
Gilgamesh floated in his vantage point as he looked down, his eyes narrowing as he stared upon the vast, pale legions. From this height, they looked like a sea of grey salt spilled across the white dunes.
The order seemed to had taken hold of them as more than half of the undead had collapsed, their ancient joints popping like dry kindling as their knees struck the sand.
Yet, the remaining half continued to persist in their ever lasting fight.
So, the orders commanded by [King's Decree] weren't absolute, at least not for now. The effectiveness of it would likely increase as he continued to advance through the ranks.
For a second, the world changed.
It began with the hair on the back of his neck. It was a prickle of static, a sudden shift in the pressure of the air. Before his mind could register the threat, the world rocketed around him as he was launched towards the ground from the air.
The blow had struck with the force of a falling star. [Golden Armour] let out a dull resounding groan, a sound that made its way across his entire body.
When Gilgamesh finally struck the earth, he could not bring himself to a stop and continued to skid through the white sands, leaving behind deep grooves that marred the land.
Great plumes of grit sprayed into the air, white and fine as powdered bone, before he finally managed to catch his footing and heave himself upright with a groan.
"Urgh... fuck."
The sentence came out as a wheeze. He coughed covering his mouth with a fist, his body bowing under the sudden, sickening ache in his chest. When he pulled his hand away and looked down, the white sand was no longer pure. It was marred by bright, hot blotches of gold.
Blood... something had made him bleed for the first time in this world.
It was a strange thing to see. In this world of shadows and ancient dust, his own blood looked impossibly bright. It was the first time something had truly reached him. The first time the world had proven it could break him.
Gilgamesh straightened his back with a sharp wince, blinking repeatedly to clear the haze from his vision.
His superior healing began to stir within him. It was a cold, humming sensation beneath his skin. Within the span of a few heartbeats, the ruined parts of his body began to knit itself back together. Burst blood vessels sealed, the jagged fragments of his ribcage slid back into place with sickening clicks, mending until the bone was whole and smooth once more.
He looked up, his face hardening into cold fury as he gritted his teeth.
"Just what..."
The aggressor did not attempt to hide itself. It floated high above, silhouetted against a sky that had been physically torn asunder.
The sheer velocity of its slash had split the clouds for kilometers, leaving a long, straight scar across the heavens.
Six wings of polished bone fanned out from its back, catching the pale light. In its hand, it held a blade, not rusted unlike that of the common soldier in the undead legion, its length of gleamed, silvered steel that looked as though it had been forged from moonlight.
It was looking, at him.
There were no eyes in that hollow skull, yet he could feel its furious gaze.
A snarl curled across Gilgamesh's lip. His scarlet eyes burning with unprecedented levels of hatred for a filth.
"How dare you, you pathetic, disgusting pile of bone, lay your filthy hand upon me!"
He pointed a challenging finger at it.
"Your end is nigh, creature."
A loathing as deep and dark as an ocean welled up within him. This creature deserved complete and utter anhiliation for daring to harm him.
They stood in stark contrast. On one side, the champion of the dead, a thing of jagged bleached bones, unfeeling, suspended by wings of bone. On the other, the champion of humanity, standing his ground looking up at the creature with loathe welling up inside of him.
There was a moment of peace as the desert fell silent around them, the wind flittering through the air.
Then the silence shattered.
The creature moved faster than he could react.
For the second time in that same night, Gilgamesh found himself launched backwards through the air.
Before he could form a plan, the undead was upon him again. Its moonlight blade was raised high, a silver arc prepared to sever his head from his shoulders.
Desperation filled his veins and through sheer instinct, Gilgamesh threw his armoured arms up to guard his neck.
The blade slammed down with the weight of a mountain.
The impact traveled in vibrations through his arms, into his shoulders, and down his spine, making his very structure ache. The bones in his forearms groaned and creaked due to force of the strike.
He was driven into the ground, the sand exploding upward around him. The air was driven from his lungs in a single, painful gasp as the his back thudded against the surface.
If not for the [Golden Armour], he would have surely been a red paste on the dunes.
The realization set in coldly throughout his being.
He could die here.
There was only one way to survive.
"Forgive me... Ea."
Time seemed to have slowed. Gilgamesh narrowed his eyes, focusing all his will on the silver point in the distance that was the creature. It would be upon him any second now.
He reached his hand out, and the world stopped.
[The Sword of Rupture] materialised in his hand.
With a resonating roar of power, Ea claimed the world as its own.
The creature hesitated. For the first time, its movements lost their fluid grace. It paused in mid-air, its six wings fluttering in an unsure rhythm.
For it felt something it had not felt in the long millennia since its heart had stopped beating.
It felt fear.
The segments of the sword began to whirr, rotating with a low hiss. A plume of white steam escaped the blade, hot and angry against the cool night air of the desert.
The creature looked upon the rotating cylinders and knew, with its undead instict that the sword meant nothing except for utter annihilation.
The runes etched into Ea's body began to glow a deep, bruised red. The light was baleful, drowning out the pale rays of the setting moon, casting long, dancing shadows across the white sand.
"Don't tell me you're scared now, bitch"
Gilgamesh's voice resonated against the silent night with sharp crack. The grin back on his face, even as his arms trembled from having the blade slammed down on them. The manic grin continued to widen even as his blood dropped down from the corner his lips.
The provocation was all it took the creature to begin its assault again. Launching itself forward with it's blade poised, preparing itself to kill the pretender in a single strike before sun rose.
Yet this time, Gilgamesh was ready. With Ea rotating furiously, he reacted in a nick of time to clash the sword against the milky white longsword of the dead.
It was unfair.
The Sword of Rupture, tore cleanly through the ancient blade, shattering it into minute particles of dust.
The undead dropped it's blade, flying back panickedly as it's skull was torn asunder from a second of contant with the sword.
Gilgamesh hadn't even realised what had happened, having raised Ea instinctively as his senses blared dangerously. It was only seconds after that his brain processed what had happened.
A madness, arising from the adrenaline and dread that were flooding his being, wormed itself through his brain. The world around him suddenly looked less real and concrete.
An arrogant laugh filled with manic energy escaped his lips as the world continued to spin around him in unrecognisable shapes and colors. His pupils contracting and relaxing with a deranged glint in them.
As rhe sun began to rise, bathing the sand with its incandescent rays, he pointed [The Sword of Rupture] towards the creature.
"Know your place, filth."
When the sunlight touched the creature, its bones lost their luster. They became brittle, grey, and disconnected. The sand beneath them swirled like a whirlpool, opening its pale maw to swallow it whole.
The fight was over.
Gilgamesh let out a long, shuddering sigh. The energy escaping his body in an instant, leaving him tired and weary.
His knees gave way, striking the glowing white ground with a heavy thud. With a muttered word of thanks, he dismissed Ea, the weight of the sword vanishing from his palm.
He leaned back, resting his hands on his laps, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
This was the closest he had ever come to death in this world. Gilgamesh shut his eyes tight, taking deep breaths to relax himself even as his body shivered sporadically.
What rank was that thing? he wondered. Corrupted? Great? Cursed?
The thought of what would have happened if it had possessed its full intelligence, its Aspect, and its original soul made a cold shiver run down his spine.
He had survived by the skin of his teeth and the grace of [The Sword of Rupture].
Clenching his teeth against the ache in his joints, Gilgamesh forced himself to stand.
His bones creaked like an old house, but he was alive. A wave of relief, sweet and heady, flooded his veins, along with a sense of triumph.
[Wings of Aru] glowed slightly as he began rising into the air with a gentle hum of power.
Gilgamesh flew back toward the site of the larger battle, but found only the empty, undulating dunes. The legions of armies clashing against each other were gone.
Even his own skeletal troops had sunk beneath the sand as well. Yet, he could still feel them, patiently waiting for his command.
He touched down on the sand, a scowl appearing on his is face.
"Sucks, it would have been fun to test them. No matter, I'll just have to wait for the sun to set."
Throwing one last glance where his troops were buried beneath him, Gilgamesh began to walk. He did not need a map to guide him for now, having memoried the direction of the Black Skull Citadel and the ruins the moment he had arrived.
It had been his first act after bidding goodbye to Sunny and Cassie and his quick teleportation across the breadth of the Hollow Mountains.
As Gilgamesh trudged through the dunes with the rippling golden portals firing off at random intervals, he couldn't help but smile at the thought of the transformation this place was about to go through.
The Nightmare Desert was going to be his domain, well technically not, he still wasn't a Sovereign yet. All in due time.
On the topic of Sovereigns, he was quite sure that they wouldn't try to attack his domain, at least not directly. Neither Ki Song nor Anvil would wait patiently, watching the other conquer the Nightmare Desert without doing anything. If one of them did try to attack, then they would leave their own domain ripe for taking.
So no, they wouldn't try to attack. At least not until the bigger fish, House Night was still in the picture.
As Gilgamesh walked patiently through the sinking sands, he continued to think. Nephis had joined Valour after a thorough discussion between them, agreeing to spy for him.
Cassie and Sunny had decided to remain independent until he officially established his clan, with both of them currently in the Chained Isles.
They were the last people he had talked to before his self imposed exile.
Traveling through the desert, with pure white sand as far as his eyes could see, Gilgamesh missed their companionship even though it had only been two days.
He wasn't traveling the desert on foot just for the sake of it, but to clear the land of the Nightmare Creature that resided inside of it.
At least, as many as he could for now. Throughly cleaning the entire desert would require a lot more time and effort, especially in the deeper parts of the Nightmare Desert near the Tomb of Ariel.
For now, he was focused on clearing a significant portion of it till the main city was built around the Black Skull Citadel, later he would clear it completely with the help of the thousands of Echoes that he had acquired along with the new found legions of undead before sending them to patrol the borders.
This desert was also pretty well protected, with both House Song and Anvil located one whole Hollow Mountains range away.
Having nothing more to think about, and wishing he had a something interesting to do rather then staring at the wide expanse of the white sands and the azure sky, Gilgamesh walked, traversing the vast lands of the baleful desert, the rays of the sun a constant reminder of pain and weariness.
The portals of [Gate of Babylon] never stopped their work, firing constantly as his eyes and ears detected the creatures that were kilometres away.
And so he advanced through Death Zone like a mindless zombie the whole day, the dry heat of the wind slapping his face, his golden armour shining with glow of a thousand stars as he continued to cook inside of it due to the shear heat.
He wouldn't dare take it off for now.
Nor did he stop even once for food or water, his face set firmly as a stone and movements unfaltering as sweat dripped down his entire body.
Just when the day neared a close, with the sun desperately bathing the lands with it's final few rays of heat, Gilgamesh had reached the Black Skull Citadel.
...
Standing at a staggering height of over what he assumed to be a thousand feet, the Black Skull Citadel loomed over him in it's harrowing glory.
The structure was a harrowing fusion between a monolithic skull and architecture, a dark colossal human-like cranium of a creature long dead, its surface falling apart and broken due to years of abuse, yet it has a lethal sheen that sucked the remaining light was it's surrounding.
Where a crown would sit, a gothic fortress of delapidated jagged spires and serrated battlements erupted from the bone-matter, looking like a cluster of obsidian thorns reaching for the heavens.
The citadel's dark exterior stood in stark contrast compared to pure white grains of sand, casting viscous, tenebrous shadows across the ground. Huge columns extended from the skull's side, grasping the area around it before crumbling to the ground.
(Image)
Gilgamesh massaged his chin and nodded approvingly at the citadel. Cool enough, but did not quite match the the aesthetic he was going for.
He would make do with it for now, until he was strong enough to enter and claim the Tomb of Ariel.
Whistling a jaunty tune which his hands behind his back, Gilgamesh made his way towards the entrance of the Citadel, it's dark gaping jaw wide open, inviting all travelers to see for themselves what it had to offer.
The first step towards building his own Legacy Clan was complete.
...
It's good to be back.
Word Count: 2576.